Using the Smart Phone App

Phone alone

Why: To get the feel of good casting strokes, to
practice them and develop the muscle memory of efficient, effective
casting.

Where: Anywhere: indoors or out.

How: Hold the phone as if it were the grip
of a flyrod - and pantomime a cast. Listen to it. You will hear its
accelerations along one or more axes.

Select a Skill (optional)

If you want to change the type of feedback for SkillShaper to
produce, click on the [SETTINGS] button on the bottom of the screens and select one of the
checkboxes that appear.

"Main Stroke" is the default skill setting,
selected automatically if you don't change it by hand. It sets
SkillShaper to reflect the force (acceleration) of your phone along
the path of your cast, throughout your whole stroke. The more the
force: the higher the pitch and louder the sound will be.
Being able to make your strokes start slowly and accelerate smoothly
to a crisp stop is the key to an efficient cast. It translates into
making longer casts and less effort. Doing it over and over, listing
to your movements as you make them, you will develop muscle memory
that will enable you to cast without thinking about it - and focus
on the fishing instead.

"Straight lines" If you want to hear it when
your stroke is veering sideways, select the "Sideways"
skill option. Now you will hear a high-pitched tone as the
stroke veers to one side or the other. To develop the
muscle memory of a straight cast stroke, practice casting until you
hear no sound at all.

"Stops" To hear only what is happening
when you are stopping your strokes, select the "Stroke Stops"
skill setting. There will now be no sound during the the main portions of
your back- and fore-strokes, but you will hear it when you put on the
brakes at the end.
Sharper stops will make higher pitches than softer ones. And other
things being equal, the cast with a sharper stop will be one with a
tighter loop. Controlling the size of your loops by controlling the
crispness of your stops is a critical skill, especially when casting
in a wind or reaching for distance.

(Optional) Pair with a smart watch

With future editions of the software, you will be able to pair a smart watch with your phone and
it serve as the phone's movement
sensor - bypassing the accelerometer
in the phone iteself. Strap the watch to a fly rod, and hear
it while casting a real fly line.

You might do this for several reasons:

1. No speaker. Some smart watches do not have an
internal speaker. The phone can play the sounds of your casts so you
can hear them.

2. More volume. You want the sound to be louder
than the watch speakers can make - perhaps so others can hear your
casts while you are casting.

3. Data. (To be available in future releases of the
Phone App). If you want a data file of casting
sessions for later review and analysis. The phone app can create a
text file from the sensor data and send it to your email account.
There you can store it, look it over, and perhaps analyze it with
our SkillShaper Desktop Analysis app.

Start up a casting session

For Phone Alone: Tap the green START button on
the phone.
This turns on the accelerometer and starts the sound-playing program

For Paired Phone & Watch. Tap the green START button on the watch first.
This turns on its accelerometer and begins broadcasting its data toward the phone.
Launch the phone app.
Make sure the "Remote" checkbox is checked.
Enter your name (optional)
And click [OK]

Tap the [Start] button on the phone
when you are ready to start casting.

The phone receive data from the watch and put out the audio over the phone's speaker.

Begin Casting

Start moving the phone or the rod around, you will hear
sound, and you will see numbers changing on the screen. These are
the accelerometer eadings (in gravity units) on the 3 axes of space,
relative to the face of the phone or watch: left/right, up/down and close/far.

For a phone held as in the illustration on the right, movement
along the direction of the cast stroke is reflected by the X axis
(left/right on the phone face)

For a watch mounted on the top of a rod shaft, cast stroke
movement is reflected by Z-Axis sensor readings.

Begin casting - and listen to your movements.

Stop a session

Press the red button labelled STOP

Save the data

On future versions of the app, you can email a data
file for the session to your desktop for later review and analysis.
To do this, at the end of a casting session, go to the phone screen and press the SEND button at the bottom of
the screen. Wait a few seconds while the phone's app processes the
data and creates a data file attachment.

Then follow the on-screen instructions to email the data to the
email address of your choice.

Be sure to obey the "Pease Wait" messages before
proceeding at each step!